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We had a surprise rain storm quite literally out of the blue this week while I was en route from work. By all accounts, it was sunny and warm one moment, dumping buckets the next, and then right back to gorgeous, late summer weather. If it weren’t for the rivers of water washing down our street or the soggy, water-logged soil in our planters, (or Bro filling me in on the events) I might not have known it had rained at all.

However badly our parched portion of California needed the influx of water, our little patio garden did not, being kept well and regularly hydrated by yours truly. As a sad result, several of our green friends essentially drowned. I didn’t get snaps of many (photographing dying plants depresses me), but I did get one picture of our tiniest jalapeno, whose miniature peppers had just starting turning a lovely red.

Look! A dead Jalapeno!

I have been waiting for peppers from several of the plants to turn, in order to make that Sriracha I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, but now I’m concerned these babies won’t last long enough to be included. (You can already see a couple of them beginning to shrivel.) I’m keeping them on the plant for now, in hopes that there is still some breath of life in it that will continue to keep the fruit vibrant for another week or two. Fingers crossed!

On the subject of peppers, the rain hastened the inevitable for this lop-sided Hungarian Sweet.

It had been trying to fall over due to the weight of its own fruit, but a couple of weeks ago, I managed to stake it upright with the help of a pair of chopsticks and a bit of twine. The ever-ripening fruit and the pounding it took from the rain seem to have proven too much for it, however. As you can see, it has toppled sideways. No stake can gain purchase with the soil so soggy, so I have simply let it lie. As long as it hasn’t snapped (it hasn’t), then there’s nothing wrong with it growing sideways, except, perhaps, that it’s slightly in the way now. It’s not as if I’m not used to that problem elsewhere in the garden.

Heh

Not all of the news surrounding the rains is negative. Remarkably, the thymelings somehow managed to survive.

I have been oh so very careful to only give them the lightest drizzle of water each day, paranoid about overwhelming them. They’re so delicate, it would be ridiculously easy to drown them. That they have weathered the storm so well when hardier plants have not is astounding, really.

The Malabar spinach seems to be loving the moisture. It’s really sprung up over the last week, and as you can see, has begun vining.

The black bean, too, is thriving. Look at all those lovely pods!

We’ve seen a resurgence in the tomato department, too. The Sweet Millions have suddenly bolted, and are once again producing fruit like crazy.

The tomatillos are coming along nicely. It doesn’t look like the fruit has gotten any bigger, but the weight it has clearly become great enough to bend each of the plants over. We now have what looks like a tomatillo arbor. It’s quite pretty, actually.

Hopefully that means that something exciting is happening inside those husks!

That about does it for this update. Join me next week when I plan to do a special blog post on all of the interesting critters we’ve discovered that our garden is home to. (Otherwise known as “Crap! I got busy and distracted, and forgot to take pictures of the plants!” lol )